If you’re a big site competing to rank for popular head terms, where’s the best place to focus your content strategy? According to a hypothesis by the good folks at Distilled, the answer may lie in perfectly satisfying searcher intent.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

If you haven’t heard the news, the Domain Authority metric discussed in this episode will be updated on March 5th, 2019 to better correlate with Google algorithm changes. Learn about what’s changing below:

Video Transcription

Hi, Whiteboard Friday fans. I’m Will Critchlow, one of the founders at Distilled, and what I want to talk about today is joining the dots between some theoretical work that some of my colleagues have been doing and some of the client work that we’ve been doing recently and the results that we’ve been seeing from that in the wild and what I think it means for strategies for different-sized sites going on from here.

Correlations and a hypothesis

The beginning of this I credit to one of my colleagues, Tom Capper, THCapper on Twitter, who presented at our Search Love London conference a presentation entitled “The Two-Tiered SERP,” and I’m going to describe what that means in just a second. But what I’m going to do today is talk about what I think that the two-tiered SERP means for content strategy going forward and base that a little bit on some of what we’re seeing in the wild with some of our client projects.

What Tom presented at Search Love London was he started by looking at the fact that the correlation between domain authority and rankings has decreased over time. So he pulled out some stats from February 2017 and looked at those same stats 18 months later and saw a significant drop in the correlation between domain authority and rankings. This ties into a bunch of work that he’s done and presented elsewhere around potentially less reliance on links going forward and some other data that Google might be using, some other metrics and ranking factors that they might be using in their place, particularly branded metrics and so forth.

But Tom saw this drop and had a hypothesis that it wasn’t just an across-the-board drop. This wasn’t just Google not using links anymore or using links less. It was actually a more granular effect than that. This is the two-tiered SERP or what we mean by the two-tiered SERP. So a search engine result page, a SERP, you’ve got some results at the top and some results further down the page.

What Tom found — he had this hypothesis that was born out in the data — was that the correlation between domain authority and rankings was much higher among the positions 6 through 10 than it was among the top half of the search results page and that this can be explained by essentially somewhat traditional ranking factors lower down the page and in lower competition niches and that at the top of the page, where there’s more usage data, greater search volume and so forth in these top positions, that traditional ranking factors played less of a part.

They maybe get you into the consideration set. There are no domains ranking up here that are very, very weak. But once you’re in the consideration set, there’s much less of a correlation between these different positions. So it’s still true on average that these positions 1 through 5 are probably more authoritative than the sites that are appearing in lower positions. But within this set there’s less predictive value.

The domain authority is less predictive of ranking within this set than it is of ranking within this set. So this is the two-tiered SERP, and this is consistent with a bunch of data that we’ve seen across the place and in particular with the outcomes that we’re seeing among content campaigns and content strategies for different kinds of sites.

At Distilled, we get quite a lot of clients coming to us wanting either a content strategy put together or in some cases coming to us essentially with their content strategy and saying, “Can you execute this? Can you help us execute this plan?” It’s very common for that plan to be, “We want to create a bunch of big pieces of content that get a ton of links, and we’re going to use that link authority to make our site more authoritative and that is going to result in our whole site doing better and ranking better.”

An anonymized case study

We’ve seen that that is performing differently in different cases, and in particular it’s performing better on smaller sites than it is on big sites. So this is a little anonymized case study. This is a real example of a story that happened with one of our consulting clients where we put in place a content strategy for them that did include a plan to build the domain authority because this was a site that came to us with a domain authority significantly below that of their key competitors, also with all of these sites not having a ton of domain authority.

This was working in a B2B space, relatively small domains. They came to us with that, and we figured that actually growing the authority was a key part of this content strategy and over the next 18 months put out a bunch of pieces that have done really well and generated a ton of press coverage and traction and things. Over that time, they’ve actually outstripped their key competitors in the domain authority metrics, and crucially we saw that tie directly to increases in traffic that went hand-in-hand with this increase in domain authority.

But this contrasts to what we’ve seen with some much larger sites in much more competitive verticals where they’re already very, very high domain authority, maybe they’re already stronger than some of their competitors and adding to that. So adding big content pieces that get even more big authoritative links has not moved the needle in the way that it might have done a few years ago.

That’s totally consistent with this kind of setup, where if you are currently trying to edge in the bottom or you’re competing for less competitive search terms, then this kind of approach might really work for you and it might, in fact, be necessary to get into the consideration set for the more competitive end. But if you’re operating on a much bigger site, you’ve already got the competitive domain authority, you and your competitors are all very powerful sites, then our kind of hypothesis is that you’re going to be needing to look more towards the user experience, the conversion rate, and intent research.

Are you satisfying searcher intent for competitive head terms?

What is somebody who performs this search actually looking to do? Can you satisfy that intent? Can you make sure that they don’t bounce back to the search results and click on a competitor? Can you make sure that in fact they stay on your site, they get done the thing they want to get done, and it all works out for them, because we think that these kinds of things are going to be much more powerful for moving up through the very top end of the most competitive head terms.

So when we’re working on a content strategy or putting our creative team to work on these kinds of things on bigger sites, we’re more likely to be creating content directly designed to rank. We might be creating content based off a ton of this research, and we’re going to be incrementally improving those things to try and say, “Have we actually satisfied the perfect intent for this super competitive head term?”

What we’re seeing is that’s more likely to move the needle up at this top end than growing the domain authority on a big site. So I hope you found that interesting. I’m looking forward to a vigorous discussion in the comments on this one. But thank you for joining me for this week’s Whiteboard Friday. I’ve been Will Critchlow from Distilled. Take care.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Phvntom, Inc. is a digital marketing company located in Boise, Idaho that creates websites, apps, and full-scale promotions/campaigns for other businesses. The views and opinions expressed in this article are strictly those of its authors and were not written by Phvntom. This article was originally published by Moz.

]]>https://phvntom.com/what-a-two-tiered-serp-means-for-content-strategy-whiteboard-friday/feed/081% of brands could disappear and European consumers wouldn’t carehttps://phvntom.com/81-of-brands-could-disappear-and-european-consumers-wouldnt-care/ https://phvntom.com/81-of-brands-could-disappear-and-european-consumers-wouldnt-care/#respondThu, 21 Feb 2019 17:21:00 +0000https://phvntom.com/81-of-brands-could-disappear-and-european-consumers-wouldnt-care/The following article, 81% of brands could disappear and European consumers wouldn’t care, was generously provided by Phvntom Inc..

Brands are becoming increasingly irrelevant, delivering poor content and failing to improve consumers’ lives, according to shoppers across the UK and beyond.

In fact, 81% of brands sold across Europe could disappear and consumers would not care. This is one of the key findings of Havas Group’s Meaningful Brands 2019 report, which is based on 1,800 brands and 350,000 respondents across 31 countries.

Globally the figure is slightly lower, with consumers saying they would not care if 77% of everyday brands disappeared. However, compared to the last Meaningful Brands survey carried out in 2017, this number has increased by three percentage points over the intervening two years.

The research suggests brands’ failure to provide interesting and entertaining content, combined with their inability to improve consumers’ quality of life and wellbeing, is making them increasingly irrelevant.

Looking specifically at the UK, while 90% of the British population expect brands to provide content, 63% believe the content being created by brands in Britain is poor, irrelevant and fails to deliver.

The Meaningful Brands 2019 data reveals British consumers feel more dissatisfied with the content being provided by brands than global consumers, 58% of whom believe the world’s leading brands are providing poor and irrelevant content.

Of the British consumers surveyed, 61% say they want brands to provide content that is interesting, entertaining or offers useful experiences or services that stand apart from the brand’s usual services. This figure rises to 78% among millennials.

The survey, which links brand performance to quality of life and wellbeing, suggests that brands which are perceived to be meaningful and working to make the world a better place outperform the stock market by 134% and increase their share of wallet by nine times.

However, despite the fact 68% of the British population believe brands should play a role in improving their quality of life and wellbeing, only 33% believe brands are actually working hard to do so.

Looking at the global findings 55% of consumers says companies have a more important role than governments today in creating a better future, this figure drops to 46% among British consumers.

The survey also indicates the growing importance of being a purposeful brand, as half of British consumers say they prefer to buy from companies with a reputation for being focused on purpose rather than just profits. Among millennials this figure rises to 55%.

However, while 81% of the British population believe companies and brands should communicate honestly about their commitments and promises, only 33% think they are actually achieving this.

Global outlook

Samsung, Nivea, Ikea and Lego have all dropped out of the global top 10 since 2017. While beauty giant Nivea has fallen from 7th to 12th, Samsung has dropped 11 places to 16, Ikea has fallen 14 places to 23 and Lego has dropped 20 places to 30.

Johnson & Johnson, Gillette, BMW and Danone are all new entrants to the 2019 global top 10 include. Johnson & Johnson’s rise into 6th place comes at a time of transformation for the FMCG giant, which said last summer it was rebranding its entire baby care portfolio in order to prioritise transparency over science.

Speaking to Marketing Week in June, Johnson & Johnson CMO Alison Lewis explained the brand was prepared to sacrifice its “sacred cows”, such as its iconic gold baby shampoo and pink lotion, in order to show parents it was committed to a transparent supply chain.

Gillette’s inclusion in the global top 10 comes after a challenging month following the release of its new US campaign evoking the #MeToo movement. The shaving brand came in for criticism over the ‘We Believe’ advert, which shows male bullying, harassment and ‘banter’ being counteracted by a progressive version of modern masculinity.

Phvntom, Inc. is a digital marketing company located in Boise, Idaho that creates websites, apps, and full-scale promotions/campaigns for other businesses. The views and opinions expressed in this article are strictly those of its authors and were not written by Phvntom. This article was originally published by Marketing Week.

]]>https://phvntom.com/81-of-brands-could-disappear-and-european-consumers-wouldnt-care/feed/0‘The three things marketers require to meet the needs of modern customers’https://phvntom.com/the-three-things-marketers-require-to-meet-the-needs-of-modern-customers/ https://phvntom.com/the-three-things-marketers-require-to-meet-the-needs-of-modern-customers/#respondThu, 21 Feb 2019 15:46:00 +0000https://phvntom.com/the-three-things-marketers-require-to-meet-the-needs-of-modern-customers/The following article, ‘The three things marketers require to meet the needs of modern customers’, was generously provided by Phvntom Inc..

The nature of modern customers means marketers face a radically different landscape from their marketing...

The nature of modern customers means marketers face a radically different landscape from their marketing forefathers and mothers.

Customers expect to make purchases and consume content 168 hours a week, whenever, and however, they choose. The rise of the 168-hour economy, at a time when the majority of marketers still expect to work the traditional 38-hour week of the 1960s, means many brands and services are failing to keep pace with expectations.

Ask senior marketers what marketing framework they’re most familiar with, they will offer McCarthy’s 4Ps (product, price, place and promotion) first published in 1960. Over the years, other models emerged. In 1981 Booms and Bitner added a further three Ps (people, process and physical evidence) and in 1990 Lauterborn heralded a more customer-centric model with the 4Cs (consumer, cost, communication and convenience).

To liberate the modern marketer something needs to change.

To help identify the skillsets to succeed, Econsultancy surveyed hundreds of marketing leaders from around the world to find the skills they need most. The resulting report, The Skills of the Modern Marketer should ring alarm bells for all marketers and the CEOs who hire them. Our findings show too few marketers know what marketing is, are taking responsibility for the marketing skills their people are trained in or have the mindset essential to thrive in the modern era.

Continue along this path and many brands will struggle to connect with their customers, let alone know how to influence their behaviour for commercial gain.

The findings are clear. Three skillsets – marketing knowledge, marketing skills and marketing mindset – sit at the heart of what a modern marketer is today. They are interconnected and inescapably intertwined, with each equally important to success.

According to Marketing Week’s latest Career and Salary Survey, just 46% of marketers have a marketing degree or certified marketing qualification of any kind, and this drops to just one in four when looking at those with a marketing degree alone.

Without a solid understanding of marketing principles you simply find yourself following discrete processes with no awareness of the purpose of what you’re doing, why you’re doing it or the bigger picture of marketing.

The findings of the survey raise the uncomfortable question of how many of today’s marketing ‘professionals’ have a credible understanding of what marketing really is.

To thrive, modern marketers need at least a foundation of knowledge upon which skills can be built from, and these can be learnt via traditional routes such as degree programmes or via CPD accredited agile courses.

Marketing skills. The skills needed to apply marketing knowledge, best demonstrated when a marketer is able to do something with some amount of confidence. These are acquired through time, practice and a professional understanding of marketing knowledge.

The most knowledgeable marketer in the building is the CMO so, naturally, she or he should be responsible for the skills their team learns. However, Econsultancy’s How Marketers Learn report found that senior marketers are responsible for just 14% of learning programmes. This raises another uncomfortable question – just how much investment is being wasted on training marketing skills that aren’t fit for purpose, or based on low to no marketing knowledge from the person briefing them?

This is further emphasised by just 13% or less of the marketers surveyed in the Skills of Modern Marketing report rating themselves an ‘expert’ in strategy, data and measurement or brand management. The three areas that should be the foundation of every professional marketer’s career.

Marketing mindset. The driver of the behaviours and attitudes necessary to build a sustainable career in modern marketing.

I admit there’s nothing new in reading the need to acquire marketing knowledge or marketing skills, even if it does feel like a punch in the guts to learn that over half of marketers have no qualified professional knowledge, and more than 80% are, at best, being trained in imperfect skills.

However, what we crucially learnt was the modern marketer must adopt a marketing mindset if they are to cope with the unforgiving and relentless pace of change that the new order of unlimited digital possibility creates. The 168-hour economy isn’t interested in waiting, or what happened in 1960, it’s interested in building, and as it builds on the original principles of the 4Ps it needs the modern marketer to build with it, and to do this requires adoption of a mindset.

In the skills report, more than two thirds of respondents identified the ability to embrace change, critically think, and collaborate as the three most important ‘soft skills’ or mindsets necessary to have a successful career in marketing today. In fact, over 90% of marketers ranked the ‘ability to embrace change’ in the top two boxes, with accompanying verbatims relating directly to their ability to learn. After all, to embrace change is to learn new ways of doing things.

Mindset enables the modern marketer to think and act differently. It is the spark that ensures you never become complicit in learning skills no longer relevant, and it’s the fuel to always have the right marketing knowledge to apply them.

The marketers who prevail will be the ones who embrace the founding principles, both new and old, of marketing knowledge, apply them with excellence through marketing skills, and develop an insatiable appetite to learn through marketing mindset.

Phvntom, Inc. is a digital marketing company located in Boise, Idaho that creates websites, apps, and full-scale promotions/campaigns for other businesses. The views and opinions expressed in this article are strictly those of its authors and were not written by Phvntom. This article was originally published by Marketing Week.

]]>https://phvntom.com/the-three-things-marketers-require-to-meet-the-needs-of-modern-customers/feed/0The Influence of Voice Search on Featured Snippetshttps://phvntom.com/the-influence-of-voice-search-on-featured-snippets/ https://phvntom.com/the-influence-of-voice-search-on-featured-snippets/#respondThu, 21 Feb 2019 08:46:00 +0000https://phvntom.com/the-influence-of-voice-search-on-featured-snippets/The following article, The Influence of Voice Search on Featured Snippets, was generously provided by Phvntom Inc..

Posted by TheMozTeam This post was originally published on the STAT blog. We all know...

We all know that featured snippets provide easy-to-read, authoritative answers and that digital assistants love to say them out loud when asked questions.

This means that featured snippets have an impact on voice search — bad snippets, or no snippets at all, and digital assistants struggle. By that logic: Create a lot of awesome snippets and win the voice search race. Right?

Right, but there’s actually a far more interesting angle to examine — one that will help you nab more snippets and optimize for voice search at the same time. In order to explore this, we need to make like Doctor Who and go back in time.

From typing to talking

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and queries were typed into search engines via keyboards, people adapted to search engines by adjusting how they performed queries. We pulled out unnecessary words and phrases, like “the,” “of,” and, well, “and,” which created truncated requests — robotic-sounding searches for a robotic search engine.

Of course, as search engines have evolved, so too has their ability to understand natural language patterns and the intent behind queries. Google’s 2013 Hummingbird update helped pave the way for such evolution. This algorithm rejigging allowed Google’s search engine to better understand the whole of a query, moving it away from keyword matching to conversation having.

This is good news if you’re a human person: We have a harder time changing the way we speak than the way we write. It’s even greater news for digital assistants, because voice search only works if search engines can interpret human speech and engage in chitchat.

Digital assistants and machine learning

By looking at how digital assistants do their voice search thing (what we say versus what they search), we can see just how far machine learning has come with natural language processing and how far it still has to go (robots, they’re just like us!). We can also get a sense of the kinds of queries we need to be tracking if voice search is on the SEO agenda.

For example, when we asked our Google Assistant, “What are the best headphones for $100,” it queried [best headphones for $100]. We followed that by asking, “What about wireless,” and it searched [best wireless headphones for $100]. And then we remembered that we’re in Canada, so we followed that with, “I meant $100 Canadian,” and it performed a search for [best wireless headphones for $100 Canadian].

We can learn two things from this successful tête-à-tête: Not only does our Google Assistant manage to construct mostly full-sentence queries out of our mostly full-sentence asks, but it’s able to accurately link together topical queries. Despite us dropping our subject altogether by the end, Google Assistant still knows what we’re talking about.

Of course, we’re not above pointing out the fumbles. In the string of: “How to bake a Bundt cake,” “What kind of pan does it take,” and then “How much do those cost,” the actual query Google Assistant searched for the last question was [how much does bundt cake cost].

Just after we finished praising our Assistant for being able to maintain the same subject all the way through our inquiry, we needed it to be able to switch tracks. And it couldn’t. It associated the “those” with our initial Bundt cake subject instead of the most recent noun mentioned (Bundt cake pans).

In another important line of questioning about Bundt cake-baking, “How long will it take” produced the query [how long does it take to take a Bundt cake], while “How long does that take” produced [how long does a Bundt cake take to bake].

They’re the same ask, but our Google Assistant had a harder time parsing which definition of “take” our first sentence was using, spitting out a rather awkward query. Unless we really did want to know how long it’s going to take us to run off with someone’s freshly baked Bundt cake? (Don’t judge us.)

Since Google is likely paying out the wazoo to up the machine learning ante, we expect there to be less awkward failures over time. Which is a good thing, because when we asked about Bundt cake ingredients (“Does it take butter”) we found ourselves looking at a SERP for [how do I bake a butter].

Not that that doesn’t sound delicious.

Snippets are appearing for different kinds of queries

So, what are we to make of all of this? That we’re essentially in the midst of a natural language renaissance. And that voice search is helping spearhead the charge.

As for what this means for snippets specifically? They’re going to have to show up for human speak-type queries. And wouldn’t you know it, Google is already moving forward with this strategy, and not simply creating more snippets for the same types of queries. We’ve even got proof.

Over the last two years, we’ve seen an increase in the number of words in a query that surfaces a featured snippet. Long-tail queries may be a nuisance and a half, but snippet-having queries are getting longer by the minute.

When we bucket and weight the terms found in those long-tail queries by TF-IDF, we get further proof of voice search’s sway over snippets. The term “how” appears more than any other word and is followed closely by “does,” “to,” “much,” “what,” and “is” — all words that typically compose full sentences and are easier to remove from our typed searches than our spoken ones.

This means that if we want to snag more snippets and help searchers using digital assistants, we need to build out long-tail, natural-sounding keyword lists to track and optimize for.

Format your snippet content to match

When it’s finally time to optimize, one of the best ways to get your content into the ears of a searcher is through the right snippet formatting, which is a lesson we can learn from Google.

Taking our TF-IDF-weighted terms, we found that the words “best” and “how to” brought in the most list snippets of the bunch. We certainly don’t have to think too hard about why Google decided they benefit from list formatting — it provides a quick comparative snapshot or a handy step-by-step.

From this, we may be inclined to format all of our “best” and “how to” keyword content into lists. But, as you can see in the chart above, paragraphs and tables are still appearing here, and we could be leaving snippets on the table by ignoring them. If we have time, we’ll dig into which keywords those formats are a better fit for and why.

Get tracking

You could be the Wonder Woman of meta descriptions, but if you aren’t optimizing for the right kind of snippets, then your content’s going to have a harder time getting heard. Building out a voice search-friendly keyword list to track is the first step to lassoing those snippets.

Need more snippets in your life? We dug into Google’s double-snippet SERPs for you — double the snippets, double the fun.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Phvntom, Inc. is a digital marketing company located in Boise, Idaho that creates websites, apps, and full-scale promotions/campaigns for other businesses. The views and opinions expressed in this article are strictly those of its authors and were not written by Phvntom. This article was originally published by Moz.

Adidas is making a big investment in hiking with the launch of a new boot, as it looks to shake up the sector and make it “fit for today’s consumers”.

Speaking to Marketing Week, Adidas’s global VP of marketing and digital commerce Stephen Dowling says the sportswear giant’s ‘Free Hiker’ shoe champions its heritage and reputation as a trendy and stylish brand while also focusing on performance. He compares that to the perception of hiking gear more generally, which while highly functional isn’t particularly fashionable.

“What we bring is a perfect combination of performance and style. The industry of outdoor wear has suffered from a perception of staleness and oldness,” he says.

“We combine the best of everything. We might not create something for the top of Everest but we’re pretty close, and you can still wear it in the street.”

Think ‘hiking’ and most people’s minds would wander to images of heavy brown boots, baggy trousers and unflattering fleeces. That is why Adidas is focused on reaching a new generation of consumers who might be under the assumption hiking is for ramblers.

Outdoor wear has suffered from a perception of staleness and oldness… We combine the best of everything. We might not create something for the top of Everest but we’re pretty close, and you can wear it in the street.

Stephen Dowling, Adidas

When it comes to creating a suitable boot, Dowling believes it’s vital Adidas strikes a balance between producing something consumers will love aesthetically and something that will withstand tough terrain.

He believes the Free Hiker can “live from the mountain to the streets” and claims it can endure about 1,500kms of trekking before a replacement is needed. That is almost twice the distance of most shoes on the market, he claims, which tend to last for about 800kms.

“We’re being true to Adidas and Adidas Outdoor in this line because if we just create an overly styled product that lets someone down in the toughest terrain, we’re not staying true to being the greatest sport brand in the world,” explains Dowling.

“Or we could create an ultra-technical shoe that looks like something my great grandfather in Dublin would have worn, but then again that’s not really Adidas. Adding uncompromised performance and style while overlaying that with our purpose that sport has the power to change lives is sweet-spot Adidas and sweet-spot consumer.”

‘Dirty fingernails’ leadership

The Free Hiker boot was borne from a hike some of Dowling’s design team completed along the Pacific Coast Trail in the US – a gruelling trek that can take five to six months to complete in total. Speaking to others on the trail, they discovered hikers were wearing heavy old-school boots despite the fact they didn’t feel comfortable wearing them.

“After a week [people on the trail] are like, ‘this just isn’t sustainable and it’s also not me, it’s not who I am’. We created the Free Hiker to be the best performance hiking shoe on the market, but one that you could wear daily on the street and bring that energy to urban environments,” explains Dowling.

They then worked with a dedicated tester who completed five months on the Pacific Coast trail with a near finished prototype of the shoe.

He adds: “We like to talk about dirty fingernails leadership and startup mentality, which is why we had our team hike the Pacific Trail to experience it for themselves.”

Adidas’ Free Hiker is water repellent, features a continental rubber sole and boost technology.

Despite Adidas’s size and scale, launching into a new sub-category isn’t easy. Dowling admits it has been hard to get the balance right between investing in performance but not going too far, while making the shoes stylish without chasing a trend.

“The challenge is ensuring we offer uncompromised performance. A lot of brands might chase a trend and a trend, for example, could be a certain style. The easiest thing to do might be to chase that style and forgo a bit of investment, insight or energy on performance,” he says. “We will absolutely not do that.

“Is that always easy? Sometimes not. But it’s the right thing to do because trends come and go but consumers will buy into brands that are part of the solution not the problem and aren’t fickle in chasing a short-term trend. We believe the free hiker should be here for the next 50 years, we are not just capturing the next five seasons.”

Launching the new hiking boot

To create some noise around the new boot – due to officially launch tomorrow (22 February) – a few retailers have been offering a small batch of the Free Hiker. The Pacific Trail hike was also part of the research for a marketing campaign that aims to portray hiking as realistically as possible.

“We’ve been seeding this product for four months now. There’s no point creating a campaign if you haven’t lived in the trenches with the consumer,” explains Dowling.

The marketing campaign, ‘Escape the Noise’, was created alongside All Conditions Media. It is designed to not only promote the shoe but hiking in general, drawing on the importance of mindfulness and taking time out from busy schedules.

“It all comes to a head with Escape the Noise, which is our consumer-facing launch where we will tell the world that we realise the pressures of city living, we understand the daily environmental worries you have,” Dowling says.

“We want to help [consumers] but we don’t want to help them in a talk-down way. We want to look them in the eye and say, ‘hey whatever you’re facing in life, if you want to escape the noise, we’re here to support you’.”

The Adidas Free Hiker in action.

The campaign, which will run across Adidas’s social and digital channels, tells the story of world-renowned DJ, Diplo, whose job involves working through the night, often into the early hours of the morning.

“When we look at people in the cities, they’re always ‘on’ and are generally craving an outlet to recharge and become a better version of themselves. Diplo is a great example of that. This guy DJs around the word until 6:30am and is on such a high leaving the concerts that when he finishes he goes for a hike to bring himself back to a place of normality,” Dowling says.

“I’m sure it happens all around the world, for many people, their outlet is hiking too. But it might not be the kind of hiking you think about. Yes there are people who hike the Alps, but in the Hollywood Hills you’ll find people hiking and in Richmond Park people go for a short hike. Really, it’s every day.”

We’ve been seeding this product for four months now. There’s no point creating a campaign if you haven’t lived in the trenches with the consumer.

Stephen Dowling, Adidas

As well as Diplo, Adidas is working with a number of influencers for the launch. There have been concerns around influencer marketing, specifically about issues such as follower fraud and authenticity. But Dowling says Adidas is clear that influencers must really be influencing in a specific category, adding that authenticity is a “non-negotiable”.

“To be really honest, we’ve turned down influencers for this campaign because of their lack of authenticity. They may be killing it in terms of views and engagement and social profile but I have a one-year-old daughter and when she turns 18 she will look behind the brand,” he says.

“There’s such transparency with technology that if you’re not living your ethos, they’ll forget about you or get rid of you.”

So what will success for this campaign look like. Dowling says there are two key markets it wants to reach.

“Success is seeing the Free Hiker in Soho, London, in Shanghai and in Manhattan but also seeing it when holidaying in the Alps or if you’re climbing Kilimanjaro. It lives in both worlds,” he concludes.

Phvntom, Inc. is a digital marketing company located in Boise, Idaho that creates websites, apps, and full-scale promotions/campaigns for other businesses. The views and opinions expressed in this article are strictly those of its authors and were not written by Phvntom. This article was originally published by Marketing Week.

Too often do you see SEO analyses and decisions being made without considering the context of the marketing channel mix. Equally as often do you see large budgets being poured into paid ads in ways that seem to forget there’s a whole lot to gain from catering to popular search demand.

Both instances can lead to leaky conversion funnels and missed opportunity for long term traffic flows. But this article will show you a case of an SEO context analysis we used to determine the importance and role of SEO.

This analysis was one of our deliverables for a marketing agency client who hired us to inform SEO decisions which we then turned into a report template for you to get inspired by and duplicate.

Case description

The traffic analyzed is for of a monetizing blog, whose marketing team also happens to be one of most fun to work for. For the sake of this case study, we’re giving them a spectacular undercover name — “The Broze Fellaz.”

For context, this blog started off with content for the first two years before they launched their flagship product. Now, they sell a catalogue of products highly relevant to their content and, thanks to one of the most entertaining Shark Tank episodes ever aired, they have acquired investments and a highly engaged niche community.

As you’ll see below, organic search is their biggest channel in many ways. Facebook also runs both as organic and paid and the team spends many an hour inside the platform. Email has elaborate automated flows that strive to leverage subscribers that come from the stellar content on the website. We therefore chose the three — organic Search, Facebook, and email — as a combination that would yield a comprehensive analysis with insights we can easily act on.

Ingredients for the SEO analysis

This analysis is a result of a long-term retainer relationship with “The Broze Fellaz” as our ongoing analytics client. A great deal was required in order for data-driven action to happen, but we assure you, it’s all doable.

5 heads of open-minded lettuce and readiness to change current status quo, for a team that can execute.

457 oz of focus-on-finding what is going on with organic search, why it is going on, and what we can do about it (otherwise, we’d end up with another scorecard export).

Imperial units used in arbitrary numbers that are hard to imagine and thus feel very large.

1 to 2 heads of your analyst brain, baked into the analysis. You’re not making an automated report — even a HubSpot intern can do that. You’re being a human and you’re analyzing. You’re making human analysis. This helps avoid having your job stolen by a robot.

Full tray of Data Studio visualizations that appeal to the eye.

Sprinkles of benchmarks, for highlighting significance of performance differences.

Google Data Studio. This is my favorite visualization tool. Despite its flaws and gaps (as it’s still in beta) I say it is better than its paid counterparts, and it keeps getting better. For data sources, we used the native connectors for Google Analytics and Google Sheets, then Facebook community connectors by Supermetrics.

Keyword Hero. Thanks to semantic algorithms and data aggregation, you are indeed able to see 95 percent of your organic search queries (check out Onpage Hero, too, you’ll be amazed).

Inspiration for my approach comes from Lea Pica, Avinash, the Google Data Studio newsletter, and Chris Penn, along with our dear clients and the questions they have us answer for them.

Ready? Let’s dive in.

Analysis of the client’s SEO on the context of their channel mix

1) Insight: Before the visit

What’s going on and why is it happening?

Organic search traffic volume blows the other channels out of the water. This is normal for sites with quality regular content; yet, the difference is stark considering the active effort that goes into Facebook and email campaigns.

The CTR of organic search is up to par with Facebook. That’s a lot to say when comparing an organic channel to a channel with high level of targeting control.

It looks like email flows are the clear winner in terms of CTR to the website, which has a highly engaged community of users who return fairly often and advocate passionately. It also has a product and content that’s incredibly relevant to their users, which few other companies appear to be good at.

There’s a high CTR on search engine results pages often indicates that organic search may support funnel stages beyond just the top.

As well, email flows are sent to a very warm audience — interested users who went through a double opt-in. It is to be expected for this CTR to be high.

What’s been done already?

There’s an active effort and budget allocation being put towards Facebook Ads and email automation. A content plan has been put in place and is being executed diligently.

What we recommend next

Approach SEO in a way as systematic as what you do for Facebook and email flows.

Optimize meta titles and descriptions via testing tools such as Sanity Check. The organic search CTR may become consistently higher than that of Facebook ads.

Run a technical audit and optimize accordingly. Knowing that you haven’t done that in a long time, and seeing how much traffic you get anyway, there’ll be quick, big wins to enjoy.

Results we expect

You can easily increase the organic CTR by at least 5 percent. You could also clean up the technical state of your site in the eyes of crawlers -— you’ll then see faster indexing by search engines when you publish new content, increased impressions for existing content. As a result, you may enjoy a major spike within a month.

2) Insight: Engagement and opt-ins during the visit

With over 70 percent of traffic coming to this website from organic search, the metrics in this analysis will be heavily skewed towards organic search. So, comparing the rate for organic search to site-wide is sometimes conclusive, other times not conclusive.

Adjusted bounce rate — via GTM events in the measurement framework used, we do not count a visit as a bounce if the visit lasts 45 seconds or longer. We prefer this approach because such an adjusted bounce rate is much more actionable for content sites. Users who find what they were searching for often read the page they land on for several minutes without clicking to another page. However, this is still a memorable visit for the user. Further, staying on the landing page for a while, or keeping the page open in a browser tab, are both good indicators for distinguishing quality, interested traffic, from all traffic.

We included all Facebook traffic here, not just paid. We know from the client’s data that the majority is from paid content, they have a solid UTM routine in place. But due to boosted posts, we’ve experienced big inaccuracies when splitting paid and organic Facebook for the purposes of channel attribution.

What’s going on and why is it happening?

It looks like organic search has a bounce rate worse than the email flows — that’s to be expected and not actionable, considering that the emails are only sent to recent visitors who have gone through a double opt-in. What is meaningful, however, is that organic has a better bounce rate than Facebook. It is safe to say that organic search visitors will be more likely to remember the website than the Facebook visitors.

Opt-in rates for Facebook are right above site average, and those for organic search are right below, while organic is bringing in a majority of email opt-ins despite its lower opt-in rate.

Google’s algorithms and the draw of the content on this website are doing better at winning users’ attention than the detailed targeting applied on Facebook. The organic traffic will have a higher likelihood of remembering the website and coming back. Across all of our clients, we find that organic search can be a great retargeting channel, particularly if you consider that the site will come up higher in search results for its recent visitors.

What’s been done already?

The Facebook ad campaigns of “The Broze Fellaz” have been built and optimized for driving content opt-ins. Site content that ranks in organic search is less intentional than that.

Opt-in placements have been tested on some of the biggest organic traffic magnets.

Thorough, creative and consistent content calendars have been in place as a foundation for all channels.

What we recommend next

It’s great to keep using organic search as a way to introduce new users to the site. Now, you can try to be more intentional about using it for driving opt-ins. It’s already serving both of the stages of the funnel.

Test and optimize opt-in placements on more traffic magnets.

Test and optimize opt-in copy for top 10 traffic magnets.

Once your opt-in rates have improved, focus on growing the channel. Add to the content work with a 3-month sprint of an extensive SEO project

Assign Google Analytics goal values to non-e-commerce actions on your site. The current opt-ins have different roles and levels of importance and there’s also a handful of other actions people can take that lead to marketing results down the road. Analyzing goal values will help you create better flows toward pre-purchase actions.

Facebook campaigns seem to be at a point where you can pour more budget into them and expect proportionate increase in opt-in count.

Results we expect

Growth in your opt-ins from Facebook should be proportionate to increase in budget, with a near-immediate effect. At the same time, it’s fairly realistic to bring the opt-in rate of organic search closer to site average.

3) Insight: Closing the deal

For channel attribution with money involved, you want to make sure that your Google Analytics channel definitions, view filters, and UTM’s are in top shape.

What’s going on and why is it happening?

Transaction rate, as well as per session value, is higher for organic search than it is for Facebook (paid and organic combined).

Organic search contributes to far more last-click revenue than Facebook and email combined. For its relatively low volume of traffic, email flows are outstanding in the volume of revenue they bring in.

Thanks to the integration of Keyword Hero with Google Analytics for this client, we can see that about 30 percent of organic search visits are from branded keywords, which tends to drive the transaction rate up.

So, why is this happening? Most of the product on the site is highly relevant to the information people search for on Google.

Multi-channel reports in Google Analytics also show that people often discover the site in organic search, then come back by typing in the URL or clicking a bookmark. That makes organic a source of conversions where, very often, no other channels are even needed.

We can conclude that Facebook posts and campaigns of this client are built to drive content opt-ins, not e-commerce transactions. Email flows are built specifically to close sales.

What’s been done already?

There is dedicated staff for Facebook campaigns and posts, as well a thorough system dedicated to automated email flows.

A consistent content routine is in place, with experienced staff at the helm. A piece has been published every week for the last few years, with the content calendar filled with ready-to-publish content for the next few months. The community is highly engaged, reading times are high, comment count soaring, and usefulness of content outstanding. This, along with partnerships with influencers, helps “The Broze Fellaz” take up a half of the first page on the SERP for several lucrative topics. They’ve been achieving this even without a comprehensive SEO project. Content seems to be king indeed.

Google Shopping has been tried. The campaign looked promising but didn’t yield incremental sales. There’s much more search demand for informational queries than there is for product.

What we recommend next

Organic traffic is ready to grow. If there is no budget left, resource allocation should be considered. In paid search, you can often simply increase budgets. Here, with stellar content already performing well, a comprehensive SEO project is begging for your attention. Focus can be put into structure and technical aspects, as well as content that better caters to search demand. Think optimizing the site’s information architecture, interlinking content for cornerstone structure, log analysis, and technical cleanup, meta text testing for CTR gains that would also lead to ranking gains, strategic ranking of long tail topics, intentional growing of the backlink profile.

Three- or six-month intensive sprint of comprehensive SEO work would be appropriate.

Results we expect

Increasing last click revenue from organic search and direct by 25 percent would lead to a gain as high as all of the current revenue from automated email flows. Considering how large the growth has been already, this gain is more than achievable in 3–6 months.

Wrapping it up

Organic search presence of “The Broze Fellaz” should continue to be the number-one role for bringing new people to the site and bringing people back to the site. Doing so supports sales that happen with the contribution of other channels, e.g. email flows. The analysis points out is that organic search is also effective at playing the role of the last-click channel for transactions, often times without the help of other channels.

We’ve worked with this client for a few years, and, based on our knowledge of their marketing focus, this analysis points us to a confident conclusion that a dedicated, comprehensive SEO project will lead to high incremental growth.

Your turn

In drawing analytical conclusions and acting on them, there’s always more than one way to shoe a horse. Let us know what conclusions you would’ve drawn instead. Copy the layout of our SEO Channel Context Comparison analysis template and show us what it helped you do for your SEO efforts — create a similar analysis for a paid or owned channel in your mix. Whether it’s comments below, tweeting our way, or sending a smoke signal, we’ll be all ears. And eyes.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Phvntom, Inc. is a digital marketing company located in Boise, Idaho that creates websites, apps, and full-scale promotions/campaigns for other businesses. The views and opinions expressed in this article are strictly those of its authors and were not written by Phvntom. This article was originally published by Moz.

GambleAware is launching its first campaign that aims to reach a broader audience than problem gamblers with a campaign aimed at impulsive gamblers

Focused on the 2.4 million men aged between 16 and 34 that it has identified are at highest risk of a developing a gambling problem, the charity hopes its ‘Bet Regret’ campaign will tap into the sinking feeling that comes after placing a bet you immediately regret.

From betting while bored at work, while drunk or in the hunt to make up losses, Bet Regret seeks to recreate the everyday situations that can lead regular sports gamblers, particularly those who bet online, to make impulsive bets.

GambleAware, the charity tasked with reducing gambling harm in the UK, wants to “intercept” at the key moment when people are putting a bet on, focusing on the regret they feel from placing the bet in the first place, rather than simply the regret of losing.

“We’re tapping into the feeling between placing the bet and well before you know if it’s won or lost,” GambleAware deputy chief executive, Iain Corby, tells Marketing Week.

“That will exist regardless of the outcome and it’s when you’ve done it because you’ve been drinking or you’re a bit bored or you’re trying to win back money you’ve lost already.”

The decision to run a “counterbalancing” preventative campaign, rather than focusing solely on problem gamblers, made sense because if someone is suffering from a gambling disorder an ad campaign probably isn’t going to help, says Corby. In fact, focusing on addiction is often the very thing that turns impulsive gamblers off.

“Anybody with a problem or who is starting to get towards a problem, if they look at a campaign they see as targeted at problem gamblers they will tend to reject it and not believe it is intended for them, because very few people with a gambling problem actually recognise that. The psychologists call this ‘othering’ where you think it is somebody else’s problem and you reject those messages,” Corby explains.

“Running a preventative campaign targeted at people who are perhaps showing the early signs of a gambling problem helps because they’re not intimidated and they feel like they can look into it a bit more and engage with it. It is not as intimidating as a campaign that talks about problems or addictions.”

GambleAware believes it is important the campaign shows environments the target group can relate to. The first advert, which airs during the Manchester United v Liverpool Premier League clash on 24 February, features a bettor furtively moving from his sofa to the kitchen to avoid his partner discovering a recent betting loss.

Created by M&C Saatchi, which won the GambleAware account in July 2018, the ad then transports the impulsive gambler pitch-side to Queens Park Rangers’ Loftus Road stadium, where he is interrogated about his decision to bet by BT Sport presenter Matt Smith and former professional footballers Dean Saunders and Danny Gabbidon. The ad finishes with the endline, ‘You’ll Bet Regret It’.

The second advert in the campaign shows a drunk man in a kebab shop toying with the idea of betting on a central American Cup fixture. The next moment he is in a TV studio in Panama where he is mocked, in Spanish, by the local pundits for his lack of knowledge of the teams.

Focused on horse racing, the final TV spot sees a bored office worker placing a bet while at work and is set to go live just before the Cheltenham races begin on 12 March.

Sky, BT Sport, ITV, Google, Clear Channel and Channel 4 have all donated space to air the advert. The campaign spans digital ads, out-of-home, social, PR and experiential activity designed to reach young male gamblers in their own communities.

Sparking a conversation

To better understand the demographic of young impulsive gamblers, GambleAware conducted a segmentation exercise with YouGov of 2,000 people in the target group, with the aim of identifying where they gamble, how they gamble and who they gamble with.

The insight guided the creative development and identified three key segments of people to target who were already thinking about changing their behaviour, concerned about their gambling or finding ways to cut down.

The charity showed the creative to recovering gambling addicts in its residential treatment centre, all of whom could relate to the content, says Corby. The advert showing someone gambling in the workplace in particular struck a cord, with gamblers relating stories about how they would lock themselves in the toilet at work to focus on betting without any distractions.

GambleAware also ran focus groups across Scotland, Wales and England with the wives and girlfriends of the target group. Corby describes them experiencing “lightbulb moments” when they recognised the behaviour in the adverts being carried out by their own partners. Going forward they said the campaign would encourage them to have a conversation about their partner’s behaviour, which for GambleAware is the “ideal outcome”.

“There’s an enormous amount of stigma associated with problem gambling and we call it a hidden addiction, so another benefit of this campaign will be to provoke conversations about gambling and the risks associated with it and hopefully destigmatise it,” says Corby.

By giving people the opportunity to talk about their betting behaviour, GambleAware hopes ‘Bet Regret’ will enter common parlance and be something gamblers discuss in the pub with their friends or on their WhatsApp groups.

Promoting a “counterbalancing” message will be important given the sheer volume of marketing messages this vulnerable target audience is exposed to. Ipsos Mori research, conducted for GambleAware in November, found that 63% of respondents believe there are too many opportunities to bet, while 67% agree that it is easy to get drawn into making impulsive bets.

Some 58% of the 3.7 million UK men aged 16-44 questioned by Ipsos Mori agreed that sometimes they make ‘impulsive bets in the heat of the moment’, while 47% said they make ‘bets I know I shouldn’t’ and many report betting while not paying full attention, while drunk or late at night.

From the sample 65% are at risk of suffering harm from gambling, according to Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI) indicators, due to risky behaviours such as betting more than they could afford to lose or chasing losses. A further 37% agree that they ‘sometimes think that they should cut down their gambling’.

Phvntom, Inc. is a digital marketing company located in Boise, Idaho that creates websites, apps, and full-scale promotions/campaigns for other businesses. The views and opinions expressed in this article are strictly those of its authors and were not written by Phvntom. This article was originally published by Marketing Week.

People reach for their mobile phones throughout the day for help getting things done. And it’s often a mobile app that delivers what they need—whether it’s a new pair of rain boots or a puzzle game to pass the time during a commute.

Universal App campaigns help connect your app with more of these app-happy consumers. Today, we are simplifying the name of “Universal App campaigns” to “App campaigns.” This move will not affect campaign features or functionality, and there’s no action required for existing app promotion customers.

App campaigns will join Search, Display, Video, Shopping and Smart as the top-level campaign names available in Google Ads.

Here’s the full list of Google Ads campaign types after the App campaigns name change

App campaigns use Google’s machine learning technology to help you find the users that matter most to you, based on your defined business goals—across Google Search, Play, YouTube, and over three million sites and apps—all from one campaign.

To date, App campaigns have delivered unprecedented results for the developer community—helping drive more than 17 billion app installs, according to Google Internal data from 2019. We hope this more direct name will help advertisers and developers get started with Google Ads and select the right campaign type for their business goals.

You’ll start to see these changes roll out over the next month. We’ll talk more about this change—and other new App ad innovations—at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in mid-March. We hope to see you there!

Phvntom, Inc. is a digital marketing company located in Boise, Idaho that creates websites, apps, and full-scale promotions/campaigns for other businesses. The views and opinions expressed in this article are strictly those of its authors and were not written by Phvntom. This article was originally published by Adwords.

The performance benefits and security guarantees offered by AMPHTML ads, which are display ads created using the AMP framework, translate to better advertiser ROI, publisher revenue and overall better user experience. Because of this, Google has expanded serving AMPHTML ads not only to AMP pages, but also to regular web pages. As of January this year, 12% of all display ads served by Google are now AMPHTML ads.

All of the code in the AMP repository is open source which is carefully reviewed by the project maintainers before being merged. As a result, ads written in AMP start performant and stay performant. Such a process also drastically reduces the likelihood of AMPHTML ads having code that takes advantage of chipset level vulnerabilities or drain CPU by crypto-mining from users’ devices.

Since AMPHTML ads can be trusted, they can be rendered into a more performant same-origin iframe. This performance boost results in the ad rendering faster on page which translates to higher publisher revenue and better advertiser ROI.

AMPHTML ads on AMP pages deliver even better ROI

An AMPHTML ad delivered to an AMP page has better performance compared to the same ad running on a regular web page. This is due to the inherent design of AMPHTML ads outlined here, giving advertisers better click through rates and viewability.

AMP pages have seen steady growth over the past few years and advertisers now have access to well over 1 billion impressions/day worth of premium (from a user experience & ad experience standpoint) inventory. In addition, more than 35 percent of ads served to AMP pages are already AMPHTML ads.

The news publisher EL PAIS partnered with Volkswagen, one of their advertisers, to run a multivariate A/B test measuring how Volkswagen’s display ads created in AMPHTML vs HTML5 would perform on AMP vs regular pages.

Simply moving from a standard HTML page to an AMP page (with the same HTML5 ad) resulted in a 26 percent CTR increase. Moving further to an AMP page with AMPHTML ads resulted in an additional 48 percent CTR increase.

Getting started with AMPHTML ads for advertisers

AMPHTML ads are a subset of the AMP spec and ships with many good-by-default ads UI components, an analytics measurement framework, a spam detection system, viewability measurement and other building blocks to create a good and measurable ad.

Google continues to invest in delivering better user ad experiences by increasing the share of AMPHTML ads vs regular ads. Once mobile app support launches in Q2, 2019, advertisers can fully transition to creating a single AMPHTML ad and have it render across all environments and devices.

We hope you’ll take full advantage of the performance, security benefits and the increased ROI by choosing to build & serve AMPHTML ads in your next campaign.

Phvntom, Inc. is a digital marketing company located in Boise, Idaho that creates websites, apps, and full-scale promotions/campaigns for other businesses. The views and opinions expressed in this article are strictly those of its authors and were not written by Phvntom. This article was originally published by Adwords.

Mondelēz is piloting cross-functional innovation teams that it hopes will allow it to adopt a more flexible and faster approach to new products as the business shifts focus from costs to growth.

The food company, which owns brands including Cadbury, Oreo and Ritz, has already invested in a network of 11 innovation centres globally. And as part of that it has adopted a more flexible test-and-learn approach so it can launch small-scale innovations faster and learn from the results.

The move comes as CEO Dirk Van de Put, who took on the top job 18 months ago, shifts the company’s focus from bottom-line cost-cutting to top-line growth. That involves “re-energising” its so-called ‘power brands’ while also adapting faster to local markets and changes in eating habits and ways of buying.

“Moving from the past focus on costs, we see the possibility to unlock further opportunities as we shift our mindset towards growth. We are creating a nimble and powered organisation with a winning attitude and the right incentives to drive the right behaviours,” he says, speaking at the Consumer Analyst Group of New York conference yesterday (19 February).

“We know that in order to succeed in the long-term we have to change the way we innovate, focusing on speed over perfection and agility over process.”

One such innovation hub is SnackFuture, which is focused on opportunities in wellbeing, the premium market and digital platforms. It brings together teams from brand marketing, consumer insights, research and development, innovation and corporate development to identify areas of growth for the snacks business.

Led by chief growth officer Tim Cofer, it has been tasked with contributing $100m to revenue growth by 2022. And it has already seen the launch of products including Cadbury Joy Fills in the UK and Oreo Rainbow products in China.

We know that in order to succeed in the long-term we have to change the way we innovate, focusing on speed over perfection and agility over process.

Dirk Van de Put, Mondelēz

“SnackFuture is unique because it combines inventing, reinventing and external venturing under the same roof,” explains Van de Put.

The innovation hubs are part of wider changes at Mondelēz so it can move faster on new opportunities. It has already restructured its marketing team, bringing in four regional chief marketing teams under one global CMO as part of a wider overhaul of the business that focuses it into 13 geographic units across four regions set up to make most decisions local, including on innovation, portfolio and investment, and incentivising on a local level too.

“It makes accountability very clear and very direct,” adds Van de Put. “We see opportunities to invest and grow our business.”

That investment will also be put into marketing, with Mondelēz’s CFO Luca Zaramella describing 2019 as a “stepped up investment year” that will see more money given to local brands to grow their sales, although it plans to “keep momentum” in global brands.

That includes Cadbury, which was supported through a new brand marketing campaign last year focused around its brand purpose of generosity. Van de Put claims that repositioning “connected really well with our consumers”, leading to a six-point increase in brand consideration and a rise in organic net review in mid-single digits in 2018.

Cadbury also benefits from its “agile innovation approach”, launching new products such as Freddo’s Little Treasures while also using Cadbury as an “umbrella brand” for more occasions such as in the bar segment through the launch of Crispello and “reinvigoration” of Fuse.

“To drive this growth, we are using a deeper understanding of our consumers to find areas to drive incremental growth,” says Van de Put. “Our agile innovation approach focuses on making sure that Cadbury remains the taste of the nation among our younger consumers.”

Phvntom, Inc. is a digital marketing company located in Boise, Idaho that creates websites, apps, and full-scale promotions/campaigns for other businesses. The views and opinions expressed in this article are strictly those of its authors and were not written by Phvntom. This article was originally published by Marketing Week.